Hallmarks Of An Effective Flashback

In narrative, we catch characters in the middle of things but each story has its own history. A flashback moves back in time, catching us up on the significant events that happened before the story’s opening. It can fill in essential backstory, influence the way we view the present, or illuminate a character’s desires and motivations.

But when writers overuse flashback, readers grow impatient, losing interest in, or even forgetting, what’s happening in the now of the story. Yes, we should explore our story’s past. But at some point in revision, we need to reign the past in, selecting and shaping only those episodes that are crucial to understanding the present.

An effective flashback can:

Deepen Our Understanding Of A Character
In his classic novel Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates brings us back to a particular day in Frank Wheeler’s childhood when he accompanied his father to work. As he steps inside his father’s world, young Frank experiences a range of sensations: thrill in the bustle of New York City and the novelty of wearing his first suit and tie, a “shiver of wonder” as he gazes up at the building where his father works, pleasure in seeing his own dignified reflection in the barber shop window, dread as he rides the elevator that gives “no sense of flight, but only of confinement and nausea” and repulsion as he eats lunch with his father’s overweight boss whose mouth is “clinging and trembling with spittle.”

This flashback is significant because it contains the conflicting emotions that plague Frank Wheeler as the novel presses forward. It dramatizes the evolving struggle between his desire to break free from the job he despises and his impulse to stay.

Lend Later Scenes Dramatic Power
Early in Revolutionary Road, Frank Wheeler recalls a time his wife had told him about a particular morning at school “…when a menstrual flow of unusual suddenness and volume had taken her by surprise in the middle of a class.” He imagines how she must have run from the room “with a red stain the size of a maple leaf on the seat of her white linen skirt.”

This flashback is reflected back to us at the novel’s end when April Wheeler induces an abortion. And while Yates spares us the gory details of the abortion itself, the earlier image of blood flow, of the red stain spreading on her white skirt, resonates in our mindscape.

Bear The Story’s Meaning
Most of Said Sayrafiezadeh’s non-fiction story “The Afflicted” takes place in the present as the narrator and his girlfriend wait in the hospital ER for her wounded finger to be sutured. But the emotional movement happens as he confronts his painful childhood.

While observing a five-year-old boy who “appears far too comfortable and familiar with being in the emergency waiting room,” he leaps years back in time to a day when he was knocked unconscious after falling off his tricycle. “My father had left home long ago,” he tell us, “but my nine-year-old sister was still living with us and when I came to, she was sitting beside me.”

Having established his father’s absence early on, each visit into the past then gathers meaning, bringing us closer and closer to the emotional core. Three pages later, he gives us this:

The Andy Griffith Show is on television now. When I was child, it came on right before suppertime and I would watch it imagining that I was Opie, and that Andy was my dad, and that we lived in Mayberry and went fishing together. And then my real-life mother would break this reverie by calling me to dinner, and I would sit down with her at our fatherless table and eat a pathetic meal of frozen peas and carrots and Uncle Ben’s rice. I would spread the concoction evenly over my plate and pretend it was a pie. Then I would eat a slice of it and reshape it again, filling in the missing wedge.

The narrator’s past attempt to reshape his imaginary pie, to fill in the missing wedge, reflects the emotional void that haunts him in the present. This need to reconcile the deficits of his childhood with the yearning of his adult self is illuminated at the story’s end, when past and present converge:

I take my girlfriend’s good hand as the doctor prepares to sew. One day maybe, sometime in the future, if all works out okay, I will ask my girlfriend to marry me, and I will one day find myself sitting beside her in a hospital room, holding her hand as she prepares to deliver our baby. I will surmount the misery of my childhood and become the father I never had. I will invent it out of thin air.

Launch From The Present Moment By A Significant And Related Incident Or Image
In “The Afflicted” it is the wounded little boy in the emergency waiting room and later, a classic TV sitcom about a father and son. In Revolutionary Road it is a walk down an empty school corridor after April’s failed performance in an amateur play, and the hint of their troubled marriage.

Ideally, the image or episode in the flashback then launches itself back into the present story, adding drama and weight to the narrative. After lingering on the school day in April’s past, here’s how Yates returns us to the present:

Her face must have looked almost exactly the way it did now, as they opened this other fire-exit door and walked out across these other school grounds not many miles from Rye, and her way of walking must have been similar too.

When a story uses flashback effectively, the past and the present speak to each other, answering each other’s narrative questions and posing new ones.

These are my thoughts on a few ways to get the greatest payoff from flashback. What are yours?

Looking forward to your insights.

        

Tags: Fiction, flashback, Memoir

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Fiction & Non-fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.